very important to our past which leaf us a legacy -- which leave us a legacy for future generations to be able to the remember them by. there's also engineering significance, the construction or the aid that was lent in the construction by the japanese. that's an oft-overlooked aspect of it. but we also have to look at what a story like the development of the tacoma eastern has to teach us in the future. and and i believe that the book does a very good job in being able to lay out that this was an important and significant railroad not only to tacoma, but to the region as well. >> next from our trip to tacoma, university of washington-tacoma economics professor katherine baird offers her thoughts on the state of the u.s. education system. >> the name of the book is

"trapped in mediocrity," and i wrote this book kind of two influences kind of came together. one is just my work as a scholar. so i do research on education policy, and i'm particularly interested in the degree to which our education system creates a level playing field. what i feel our education should do is create a level playing field, and my research looks at policy from the point of view of the degree to which our education system creates a level playing field. and that got me to think about our educational system and led me to having lots of conversations with people trying to figure out some of these oddities and why there seemed to be a lot of entrenched unfairness in the way that education was delivered.

unfairness that advantaged people like me but not people who i thought were more in need of a really excellent education. and so through a long period, probably three or four years spending thinking about education and reading and talking to people and reading outside of sort of the economics literature, a few themes emerged in my mind as ways of explaining our educationing -- educational system. and so my purpose in the book is really to bring these concepts to a lay audience and to explain our educational system in a way that i hope that people can understand. the underlying theme is that -- this is where the title "trapped in mediocrity" comes from -- is that our educational system has very low standards, and it has very low standards by just about

any way that you measure standards in education. and that's not particularly controversial. i don't know that there's any strong advocates for saying that we have really an excellent school system. you know, we have pockets of excellence, but as a whole, it's not excellent. so we have low standards, poor performance overall and that the institutional aspects of our educational system sort of conspire to keeping our standards low. in other words, it's -- we're trapped. that's where the "trapped" comes from. the history of our educational system is actually a real success. go back to my grandfather was born in 1889, and he got an eighth grade education. he was typical of his generation, that you would -- wouldn't go on to high school. your education stopped with what today we call middle school. and high school was elite. there was about 10% of the

population went on to high school. high school was designed to be training for college. and so high school you took latin, you took greek, you took, you know, kind of a classical education. and so in starting in the, you know, 1920s or so with industrialization and urbanization, there became greater demand for more education because more education started to have more of an economic impact. and so our high schools opened up to a lot more of the population started going to high school. i think by 1940 it was something like 40% of population went to high school, and then nowadays, you know, everybody, almost 100% at least starts high school. they don't necessarily start, but they at least start high school.

so this is kind of one of the success stories is that we, the united states, is really at the forefront of this opening up to mass education. you think about, well, how do you get what happens at the school level or within a classroom to change. let's say you want kids to have a better education. you've got to think about, well, what's the policy level -- lever that you can change to affect that. and when the systems are what sociologists call and i call in my book loose couplings, they're loosely connected, it means if the federal government wants to do something, it's not translatedded down to the school level. -- translatedded down to the school level or to the classroom level. because each of those entities has a lot of, has a lot of autonomy. they have all sorts of ways to not comply or to comply in a way

that appears that they're complying, but they're really not. so just as a quick example of that, think of the no child left behind at the federal level that was passed by president bush in 2001. so that was an effort be by federal government to the tell states -- to tell states you have to have, articulate what your standards are for your grades 3-10, you have to articulate what you're expecting kids to learn, and then you have to demonstrate to us that the kids have actually learned those things that you want them to learn. that was kind of the essence of what no child left behind was. set standards and then tell us, prove to us that kids have met those standards. so if you know anything about no child left behind, you know that just about everybody in

education hated it. so there was a tremendous amount of resistance to this. now, you know, some people were actually quite, you know, liked in child left behind and believed in it. i think even if if you liked it, you will find that the implementation was extremely problematic. and, you know, so there's a lot of resistance, there's a lot of ways that people got around it and sort of gamed the system, and a lot of those ways that people gamed the system was really perverse. so a lot of, what a lot of states did many response to -- in response to the federal government telling them you have to set standards and you have to show us that your kids met those standards is they simply lowered their standards. which is kind of exactly the opposite of what you want to have happen. and i think that sort of tells you the degree of conflict and the difficulty of getting things done, because the system is not

well coordinateed, and it's not -- it's really not a coherent system for providing quality education for kids. you know, kind of, well, what else can we do. and i think what we see is the common core. so what states have done is they are all trying to adopt independently a similar standard called common core standards, and if all states adoptedded that, then essentially you would have, you would have national standards only achieved at by each state kind of signing on. so that has been a way of getting away from the tough hand of the federal government and states saying, hey, let's see if we can fix this together if we all just kind of collaborate on that. so that's, i think, explains where the common core came from.

and that now is having its own backlash and and caught up in education wars which is kind of the history of education policy. just whatever new idea comes down pretty soon gets caught up in, often, ideological wars. and lost in all that is the education of our kids. what does a good educational system look like, and i would say a good educational system is one where at the central level many our country the federal government you have set curriculum, you set standards, and you finance your schools. because you can't do one, set standards and curriculum, unless you're going to finance it. so you have to do those. and that's where our federal government, a federal government should be doing, should be doing those things. and then you -- after you -- sorry.

and you should also be finding out the degree to which kids are acquiring the skills and the knowledges that you want them to acquire. so you've got to know that. and then you just let schools educate kids, because schools are the ones that can do that. and the federal government or anybody shouldn't be too overly prescriptive in in this how you do that. -- in how you do that. but you set standards, you make it clear, you give them the resources, give schools the resources that they need, and then you hold them accountable. and you hold them accountable by allowing parents to have lots of options more their kids; different schools they can go to if they're not happy with the one that their kids go to. so that's what a good school system looks like, where you give school-level autonomy and you have central financing and

standards. i think there's a growing consensus around the world, actually, that that's the model that works. and you see this now, you see, you see lots of different countries taking on reform that looks a lot more like that. so there is this convergence slowly occurring where that occurs. so then the question is, well, how do we do that in the united states. that's your question. that's really, really difficult because it's so different from what we have. and i think the best chance we have are some experiments. you have some experiments where you demonstrate the potential for different models to be effective, you allay people's fears, you kind of get over some of the education wars that we have that that a lot of it is just based on rhetoric and not

based on outcomes. so you could have some experiments as, for example, has been done in england where the federal government maybe announces some initiative where they're going to start funding particular schools or school district in exchange for giving those schools a lot of autonomy. and england has done this, and they started this kind of trial project, and people are watching the results. and they're seeing that this combination of federal funds, federal standards and school autonomy has been showing some results. so that's kind of an example of what we could do. we sort of have that a little bit in the charter school movement, but it's that charter school movement is, has a particular oddities of our educational system in what sort of is politically possible

within that. i suppose in some ways i think the charter school system does have the potential to show that when you give schools autonomy and you hold them accountable, that this might be a good model that we can learn from. >> i'm standing in front of commencement bay here in tacoma, washington. it is home to the port of tacoma and is one of the most active commercial ports in the world. as we continue our coverage of tacoma's literary culture, we will learn the history of the anarchist movement in washington. >> to be an anarchist in the early 20th century was to be -- put yourself in a pretty challenging position in relation to the contemporary society. people had a lot of ideas and biases against anarchists, and they also wrote in newspapers, and they were putting out